France's interior minister today defended the police handling of anti-Nato protests in Strasbourg in which shops were ransacked and buildings including a seven-storey hotel were set ablaze.
A huge police presence ensured that yesterday's meeting of leaders of the Nato military alliance, including US President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, passed off uninterrupted.
But residents of a working class district close to the Rhine river said they had been abandoned as hundreds of masked youths rampaged through the area, smashing windows, hurling stones and setting off fireworks.
The mayor of Strasbourg, Roland Ries, said that despite the big police presence, security forces had failed to prevent the violence and called for an inquiry.
"They were very much in evidence - there were plenty of accusations that Strasbourg had been turned into a fortified camp - but they were not able to prevent this," he told reporters.
"There were probably problems at the level of the police supervision of the demonstrations," he said, adding: "We'll have to look at all that very closely to see what happened."
But Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie rejected charges that police had failed to protect residents.
"The security forces did their job perfectly," she told RTL radio. "Their mission was to ensure that the summit passed off well and despite all the various attempts to prevent it, the summit passed off well," she said.
"Their second mission was to protect the people of Strasbourg against the violence of the extremists who used the internet to call for blockades and violence and there were no injuries in the population," she said.
The issue of urban violence has been particularly sensitive in France since the weeks of violent rioting in 2005 that saw several of the country's run-down urban "banlieues" transformed into virtual conflict zones.
Between 10,000 and 30,000 people marched in Strasbourg and about 7,000 joined an anti-Nato rally in nearby Baden-Baden, just across the German border.
Protest organisers said most of them took no part in the violence and blamed tensions on security forces, a charge that Ms Alliot-Marie rejected, accusing a group of several hundred extremists, many from outside France.
"There were Germans, Greeks, people from a certain number of countries. They are always there and we know that there is terrible violence before every Nato summit," she said.
Reuters